Monday, February 18, 2008

I received a note this morning from a woman named Allison asking for a copy of this poem. Allison, it's in my first book Lucky Wreck. (You'd be a dear to buy it if you'd like, but just in case that's out of your price range..and because I understand the need for a specific poem at a specific time..here you go!). This one is very near to my heart. I wrote in 2001 while at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. The last tercet is in italics, but for some reason I can't make that happen here.

The Lessing Table

The dinner table was too smalland that was obvious.We had to buy smaller forks,smaller chairs, stop talking.

You took the saltshakersoff. I decided I’d only makesoft foods so we wouldn’t have to use knives anymore.

It kept on shrinking for days,the butter taking over the dinnerplates, the green beans lookinglonger and mean,

until it was just a thin slippassed between us, a note on blue-lined binder paper in number two pencil:

Make the train wheels lock.Make the mobile stop.Do something, do something.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Here is on of my favorite love poems:

Drunk As DrunkPablo Neruda

Drunk as drunk on turpentineFrom your open kisses,Your wet body wedgedBetween my wet body and the strakeOf our boat that is made of flowers,Feasted, we guide it - our fingersLike tallows adorned with yellow metal -Over the sky's hot rim,The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solsticeAnd equinox, drowsy and tangled togetherWe drifted for months and wokeWith the bitter taste of land on our lips,Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for limeAnd the sound of a ropeLowering a bucket down its well. Then,We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,And lay like fishUnder the net of our kisses.